


November 1, 1987

by lilabee



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Implied/Referenced Child Neglect, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Pre-Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:54:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25345771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilabee/pseuds/lilabee
Summary: Six years after the Potters' deaths, a desperate Remus tries to see Harry. The visit brings up old memories.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 37





	November 1, 1987

Petunia didn't tend to sleep well on Halloween. She told herself it was because of Dudley. He was always sick on sweets, poor thing.

Around five she went out to water the plants, still in her dressing gown and slippers, and found that she was not alone. There was a person in the garden, plain as you please, staring up at Number 4 with a somewhat numb expression on his face. He was exactly the sort of person Petunia did _not_ want in her garden. A young man, thin, shabbily dressed and prematurely grey, looking like someone had just clubbed him in the head. 

“What are you doing here?” she called across the garden. “This is private property.”

He turned.  
  
And she knew him.

_July. 1977. Mr. Evans died in March. Heart failure. But Lily is having friends over for a week. Friends. From school. It’s so unfair, just when Petunia had met a slightly older, entirely normal man who takes her out to roast beef lunches and says things like, “Have you considered investing in drills?” Just when life is finally flickering on the edge of alright._

_But now Lily is back, and she’s brought four boys with her. Almost unannounced. Well. Not unannounced but unapproved. Their mother is frantic, blowing up air mattresses in the living room, baking flaky-crusted fish pies. Her grief vanishes in the preparations. Petunia’s only grows._

_When they appear on the doorstep, dressed--Petunia has to admit--almost like real people, Lily takes great pains to introduce them. But Petunia will not call them by name._

_The forgettable one. This one is small and fat and blond. He seems the outlier. The others are...striking, somehow. But this one’s only noticeable feature is how un-noticeable he tries to be. He won’t meet Mrs. Evans’ eye. He laughs too loudly and then checks himself, face flamed. He trails the others and leaves a day early, saying he’s going to visit his parents in the countryside. Sometimes Petunia catches him looking at her. Not in the way men look at girls but in a curious, searching, painful way._

_The handsome one. Petunia is used to being the first awake, to making tea while her parents and sisters sleep, to having the house to herself for the first hour of her day. But the handsome one is an even earlier riser. The first morning, Petunia pads downstairs to put the kettle on. Good morning, says a voice where there should be no voice. She nearly shoots out of her skin. Didn’t mean to scare you. He’s bare chested. His tattoos are somehow both subtle and bold--a constellation sprouting out of his hipbone, a vicious-looking paw print on his ribs, a phoenix rising from his spine. It doesn’t escape her, how he’s purposefully chosen the most painful places. Next he’ll do his knuckles. Or his skull. But despite the tattoos and the glossy, chin-length hair, his manners are impeccable. He stands up when Mrs. Evans enters the room. He holds doors. He compliments meals and holds his fork like it’s a precision instrument._

_James Potter. She tries but can’t forget his name. Can’t forget anything about him, really. Perhaps she’s unconsciously training for the subsequent years she will spend staring at his face in miniature._ This _one she hates. Why does no one but Petunia seem to notice that James Potter’s mattress is never slept on? That Lily comes down to breakfast in shirts that aren’t hers? That both of them act like they’ve got sunshine coming out of their freckles? And he’s so cheeky. Oh, he’s cheeky. He’s the one, Petunia realizes, who knows the most about her. That’s heard the most about her. He asks incessant questions. Where’s the cat? Can I get a recipe for that blueberry cake? What’s this? How does this work? Can I try? Lils, do you see this? Are you listening to me? Padfoot, mate, is that new? Should he be touching that? Moony, did you sleep? He should stop touching that, right? His smile splits his face. Shatters him. He exists in constant motion. He goes on runs. Runs! In the middle of the day. Unannounced. Slips off, reappears an hour later. Sweaty, smelling like joy._

_And then there was…_

“Remus Lupin.” He offered his hand. “We’ve met before. I’m sorry to bother you so early.”

Petunia was so shocked, so affronted, that she momentarily forgot herself. “What are you doing here?” 

“I thought I might see Harry. It’s been five years.” He gave her a pained look. “I’m not sure I can wait five more.” 

When she said nothing, he took a deep breath. “Please. You remember us...the four of us. He and I are all that’s left.” 

_“Mum, I told you, he’s ill. It’s naught to do with your cooking.”_

_“But how ill is he? Should we take him to hospital?”_

_“Leave it, Mum, I’m begging you. It’s a condition he’s had since childhood. He’s just tired all the time.”_

_“Pumpkin, I’m worried.”_

_“Our hospitals--your hospitals--wouldn’t even know where to start.”_

_Lily and Mrs. Evans are arguing about the fourth boy. The one Petunia is afraid of._

_Where the handsome one has tattoos, this one has scars._

_If it weren’t for the scars, he might be good-looking. Soft, floppy hair. Eyes the color of milky tea. Freckles on his hands and straight, purposeful eyebrows._

_But he doesn’t sleep. And he doesn’t eat. And he looks at Petunia with a solemn and unwavering gaze._

_“It’s just a bad week for him.”_

_“A bad--”_

_“Sort of like a monthly thing, Mum.”_

_What’s odd is that he seems happy enough. The others treat him as if he isn’t strange at all. They kick footballs at him and knock books out of his hands. And he laughs, his eyes crinkling at the edges._

She tried to force herself not to care. She was good at it, after all these years. But that early fall morning with the weak golden light on the dry grass, on her cheeks, in his hair, she could not help it. “All that’s left?”

“James is dead. Lily is dead. Peter is dead. Sirius might as well be dead.” He said it like he was reading off a grocery list. “If you’d let me see him…”

“No.” Suddenly, she was firm. Perhaps it was hearing her sister’s name and _dead_ so close together, so final. “I--we don’t allow your kind in the house.” 

He blinked at her, puzzled. “You know what I am?”

Now it was her turn to be incredulous. “Of course.” She tried to summon Vernon’s vigor, but her voice, when she heard it, fell flat. “I won’t have you near my son.” 

Something shut off in him. Something died behind his eyes. He backed away like a kicked dog. “I understand,” he said finally. “I understand completely. This was...this was a mistake.” 

Would it really be so simple? Would he really walk away, leave her without any fuss?

No. Not quite. 

He turned back at the end of the walk. “Mrs. Dursley,” he said. “A fair warning. Seven is when the magic starts to show strong.” 

*

Oh. But the magic was already showing. 

He was six. Light poured out of him. Literally, once, when someone (Dudley) had locked him in a school supply basement. He glowed and seemed not to notice it. 

Animals followed him. Odd ones. Petunia came outside one August afternoon to find her nephew asleep in the grass, a young garter snake wrapped around his wrist, its tail coiled at his elbow. When he woke he peered at her through bleary eyes and offered his arm. “Look.” 

Look. She didn’t need to look. She saw and she saw and she saw. 

He was just like his mother. Like her sister. In ways she couldn’t even begin to articulate. Like when he was chewing, the way his eyebrows scrunched together and he looked so _thoughtful_ , as if nothing were more important than the task at hand. She wanted to be able to hate him and she couldn’t. She wanted to be able to hit him and she couldn’t. 

A few hours after Remus Lupin had disappeared from her backyard, Petunia found her nephew sitting at the kitchen table in his school uniform, eating a bowl of Cornflakes and trying to read Dudley’s comic upside down. Harry’s jumper (Dudley’s from the year previous) was so large that the school crest hung somewhere in the middle of his ribcage. With his enormous clothes, his impossible hair, and his hideous, recently re-taped NHS spectacles, Harry looked even to Petunia like the picture of neglect. With one of her sister’s freakish former friends on the loose, could she risk sending the boy out of doors...having him _seen…_?

She retreated to the bathroom and returned with a wet comb. He jumped a little when she first started on him but then he stilled, bony shoulder motionless under her free hand, head jerking back and forth as she waged futile battle on James Potter’s immortal hair. 

*

He didn’t like to admit it, but the encounter with Petunia Dursley shook him. He _should_ leave, should return to the tiny, airless flat in Battersea, to his tinned soup and his next assignment. But he found that he could not. No--he found, in fact, that he was buying a paper cup of tea (something he typically refused to do on principle) and walking with it to the local primary school, praying that she had sent Harry here rather than some impossible-to-find place in the city.

He took up a position across from the schoolyard, pretending to be engrossed in a Muggle novel he had grabbed at random from the bookshop. Remus couldn’t follow the story--a spy, a terrorist cell, several women with “exotic eyes.” His attention slid again and again across the street. _You are behaving like a madman,_ he told himself. 

At eleven in the morning, after subtly re-warming the tea three times for the sake of his frigid fingers, a bell rang and children flooded the schoolyard. They wore royal blue jumpers and grey trousers and there--standing somewhat apart from all the rest--was James. 

_“He looks like you, Lily. The eyes…”_

_“That’s rubbish, Remus. He’ll be James all over again. Just wait til his hair grows in properly.”_

_“I don’t know what you two are on about,” said Sirius, who was holding the baby. “He doesn’t look like anyone. What Harry most closely resembles, right now, is a very fat baguette.”_

_Lily kicked Sirius (gently, because Harry was sleeping) and Remus laughed. At two weeks old, Harry was unfathomably tiny--hardly more than a pale blue blanket and an enormous pair of green eyes. He was fresh from his bath and fast asleep on his godfather’s chest, flawless but for the nursing blister on his upper lip. Sirius was looking down at him with something approaching reverence._

_“Give him to Remus,” Lily was saying. “I won’t trust him with anyone who calls him a ‘fat baguette.’”_

_Sirius grinned, but Remus pulled away. “No, it’s alright--I wouldn’t know how--”_

_“Oh, come off it,” said Sirius. “He’s easy. Take him.”_

_And then Harry was in Remus’ arms and his head was on Remus’ shoulder and Sirius was beaming at both of them, Sirius, who must have been plotting, even then, the murders of half the people in the room…_

Seven-year-old Harry, like infant Harry, was extraordinarily small. Very thin--but James, too, had been a skinny kid. Perhaps not quite like this. _But you didn’t know James when he was seven,_ Remus told himself. And yet there was something unsettling about the whole scene. Why was Harry alone, standing so deliberately far from his schoolmates? Why were his glasses fixed with sellotape--and lots of sellotape, as if they had been broken several times? Harry was pale in the cold autumn morning and his scar stood out viciously on his forehead. Remus had not quite realized how large it would be.

Harry bent down and picked up a dry brown leaf from the concrete. Absently, he rubbed it between his palms, his gaze never wavering from the other children. When Harry opened his hands, Remus felt his breath catch--the leaf was green and shining, as if plucked from its tree in the height of summer. 

It was extraordinary magic. It was Lily’s magic--beautiful, clean, deceptively simple. But Harry did not seem to feel the same way. For a moment, he stared at the leaf in apparent confusion. Then he let it drop, retreating from the spot as if he had done something shameful. 

Remus stood there until the children were called back inside. He watched as the November wind whipped at the ground and the single green leaf stirred, flipped, and drifted away.

They would not meet again for some time. 


End file.
